Monday, January 14, 2008

Obama Plays The Race Card ... GOP, Beware!

How quickly political time flies. It seems like only yesterday the rap on Barack Obama was that he isn't black enough to get the black vote. Maybe it was dancing with white chicks that solved this problem, maybe not, but now he's suddenly black enough to play the race card against Clinton -- a preview of what he'll do (pardon the expression) in spades against the GOP if he gets the nomination.

HuffPo was among the outlets this a.m. spilling the contents of an Obama race card memo:

Sen. Barack Obama's presidential campaign has prepared a detailed memo listing various instances in which it perceived Sen. Hillary Clinton's campaign to have deliberately played the race card in the Democratic primary.

The memo, which was obtained by the Huffington Post and has been made public elsewhere, is believed to have been given to an activist and contains mostly excerpts from different media reports. It lists the contact info and name of Obama's South Carolina press secretary, Amaya Smith, and is broken down into five incidents in which either Clinton, her husband Bill, or campaign surrogates made comments that could be interpreted as racially insensitive.

The document provides an indication that, in private, the Obama campaign is seeking to capitalize on the view - and push the narrative - that the Clintons are using race-related issues for political leverage. In public, the Obama campaign has denied that they are trying to propagate such a perception, noting that the document never was sent to the press.

But irrespective of the memo, the image of the Clinton campaign sowing racial discord did bubble to the surface following a series of comments made this past week. On Friday, Bill Clinton called into multiple African American radio shows, including one hosted by Al Sharpton, to tamp down backlash against him for calling Obama's candidacy a "fairy tale."

All of a sudden "America's first black president" is just a race-baiter because he used the words "fairy tale" in a sentence about Obama! (Shouldn't he be a gay-baiter, really?) If Bill Clinton can get painted with this nasty brush, imagine what the powers of black victimization would do to Romney, McCain or Huckabee!

Am I overstating the case? Well, read Clinton's remarks in context and see:

"It is wrong that Senator Obama got to go through 15 debates trumpeting his superior judgment and how he had been against the war in every year," said Clinton, "and never got asked one time, not once, 'Well, how could you say, that when you said in 2004 you didn't know how you would have voted on the resolution? You said in 2004 there was no difference between you and George Bush on the war and you took that speech you're now running on off your website in 2004 and there's no difference in your voting record and Hillary's ever since?' Give me a break.

"This whole thing is the biggest fairy tale I've ever seen..."

Anyone who sees a racial comment in that is the true racist, because he (and I'll use "he" because this is coming out of Obama's camp) sees race everywhere.

Hillary also got nailed by a black man for saying that it took Lyndon Johnson to get the Civil Rights Act passed -- which is, politically speaking, the truth. Johnson knew how to work Congress, particularly the old Southern Dem racist members, to get it done. But she committed the sin of not doing the mandatory genuflect to Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, even though they had nothing to do with the political gamesmanship Hillary was referring to.

Whatever the Clintons' motivations in their cozying up to black voters, they don't deserve what they're getting from the Obama campaign. As the primaries in the Southern States are upon us, it's obvious that Obama's people are pulling out all the stops to push black voters away from the Clinton machine and into the now black enough arms of Obama.

If the strategy works, we'll know it soon enough ... and we'll know what's in store when Obama begins campaigning against the party of the Great Emancipator.

hat-tip: memeorandumand a hat-tip to Incredible Daughter #3 for suggesting the Ellen photo

"Thank you for the "Voice of the Victims films. The students really liked them, and it means so much to them to hear real stories and not watch a cheesy drama like so many other videos."
— High school teacher.